Dusty May’s Ambitious Vision Carried a Michigan Juggernaut to a Championship

INDIANAPOLIS — Dusty May stood on the confetti-strewn court with a national champion hat turned backward on his head, a bottle of water in his right hand and his left hand in his pocket. He was watching “One Shining Moment” on the Lucas Oil Stadium big screen, starring his Michigan Wolverines.

May grinned at highlights of his players doing great things, like forward Yaxel Lendeborg and center Aday Mara slamming home dunks. He quietly mouthed, “Oh, s—” when the video montage showed his guard, Roddy Gayle Jr., roaring off the floor to dunk a missed shot. His eyes were dry but his face was beaming as a season of perfect vision reached its culmination.

At age 49, the descendant of coal miners from rural Indiana has now authored a basketball miracle and a basketball masterpiece. Taking Florida Atlantic to 35 wins and the 2023 Final Four was the miracle; building this Michigan team and winning a title is the masterpiece.

Monday night, May capped off one of the greatest single-season coaching jobs in college basketball history with a national title. He’s the portal king, the team-building genius, the X’s and O’s boss all rolled into one.

The 69–63 victory over UConn was an artless street fight—a departure from Michigan’s high-scoring sprint through the NCAA men’s tournament to get to this point—but the Wolverines showed their mettle and versatility by finding a way to win it. 

Ugly as the final game was, it punctuated a beautiful year of player identification, development and roster building. May and his staff created an ambitious framework and then filled it in with four key transfers, four Michigan holdovers from 2024–25 and a freshman—selfless players who wanted to do something great together.

“When you bring a group this talented together and they decide from the beginning that they’re going to do it this way and they never waver and they never change, that’s probably the most uncommon thing in athletics now,” May said.

As this 37–3 season built into something bigger and bigger, a narrative formed that Michigan had simply money-whipped the rest of the sport in the transfer portal. But in point of fact, May identified four talented players who were not finished products—three of them from power-conference schools who hadn’t quite lived up to their pre-college billing. They came to Ann Arbor and got better. Much better.

“We took four guys out of the portal,” May said Sunday. “If you listen to the college basketball gospel, we took 17 of them, and that’s all we have.”

We’re still relatively early in the transfer portal era. This Michigan team is the greatest utilization of the portal we’ve seen, and it will be very difficult to top.

Morez Johnson Jr. was a raw talent in need of sharpening after one season at Illinois. He nearly doubled his scoring (from 7.0 ppg to 13.1) year-over-year, in part because he improved his free throw accuracy 16 percentage points.

Yaxel Lendeborg was a high-energy rebounding fanatic at UAB with questionable ability to play on the perimeter. In two seasons with the Blazers, he made 37 three-pointers while shooting 34.9% outside the arc. In one season with Michigan, Lendeborg has made 67 threes while shooting 38.3%.

Aday Mara’s potential remained unrealized in two seasons at UCLA. As a sophomore in 2024–25, he averaged 6.4 points, 4.0 rebounds, 1.6 blocks and 1.0 assist per game. This season as a Wolverine, the 7′ 3″ Spaniard averaged 12.2 points, 6.8 rebounds, 2.6 blocks and 2.5 assists, anchoring the best defense in the nation.

And Elliot Cadeau was a highly rated disappointment in two seasons at North Carolina, which itself was coming off a disappointing season. This season at Michigan his scoring nudged up, from 9.4 points to 10.3, while his turnovers dropped, from 3.1 to 2.4. He was at his best at the Final Four, torching Arizona in the semifinals for 13 points, 10 assists and four steals, then providing desperately needed offense against UConn with a game-high 19 points. That earned him Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors. 

“Last year I was really down on myself, a lot of people doubted me,” Cadeau said. “And I’m just so proud of myself to be able to say I was the most outstanding player and win a national championship at the same time.”

Cadeau was the first of the quartet that May landed, but he didn’t do it without cross-checking with former Tar Heel player and current assistant coach Sean May. He wanted to know what kind of teammate Cadeau was.

“He gave me all the intel and everything on the background,” Dusty May said. “I just said, ‘Let me ask you one question: Would 17-, 18-year-old Sean May, who was a McDonald’s All-American, NBA player—would he want to play with Elliot Cadeau?’ And he said, ‘Expletive, yeah, absolutely.’ 

“So that was a stamp on the intangibles and whether I thought we could win this with him because on film it was there. He’s a savant. He’s brilliant.”

As May was pulling together this remade roster, hopes were high. Then the Wolverines played poorly in two exhibition games—scraping by St. John’s and losing to Cincinnati—and doubt began to creep in. Maybe the roster construction was all wrong.

“We considered pivoting and changing our lineup and going in a different direction, and maybe admitting failure for our vision,” May said.

May called a staff meeting in the conference room of the Michigan basketball offices. They were going to figure out, then and there, whether the grand plan could work or needed to be scrapped.

“We did a deep dive in everything that you could come up with to try to predict whether we thought it would work,” May said. “Once we left that meeting, we were more committed than ever that this is going to work.”

The big test would be the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, Nov. 24 to 26. The Wolverines roared through it like a juggernaut, beating San Diego State, Auburn and Gonzaga by a combined 110 points. All serious questions were answered.

Michigan kept right on stomping its way through the season, winning the Big Ten by four games. A loss in the Big Ten tournament title game did nothing to alter the Wolverines’ standing as one of the top three teams heading into the NCAAs, along with Duke and Arizona.

Once liberated from the grind of conference play, Michigan’s offense reignited. It became the first team in NCAA men’s tournament history to score 90 or more points in five straight games, taking the execution up to a near-perfect degree with blowouts of Tennessee in the regional final and Arizona in the national semifinals.

All the Wolverines had left to do was beat UConn to win their first national championship since 1989, and the Big Ten’s first since 2000. But the hardest thing to do in the tournament the last four seasons has been beating UConn. They weren’t going to be scoring 90 in this one.

Huskies coach Dan Hurley called Michigan the “Monstars” on Sunday, referring to the superpowered villains in the basketball movie Space Jam. But Hurley, winner of 18 of his last 19 NCAA tournament games, had a team that would not submit easily.

The game was an unsightly mess, which is what the underdog Huskies needed to hang around. The shooting was horrendous: Michigan’s 13.3% three-point shooting was the fourth-worst in title-game history; UConn’s 30.9% overall shooting ranks just outside the bottom five in title-game annals. 

There was no shortage of effort, just a mass shortage of offensive execution. A pileup of possessions early in the second half included Michigan blocking a UConn shot, then altering a follow shot, led to Mara holding the ball at midcourt as three Huskies swatted at it (and him). Teammates were open all over the court, but Mara couldn’t find them as he was being besieged.

UConn was in foul trouble. UConn couldn’t shoot. UConn never led in the final 25 minutes. But UConn was not going away, and the memory of its comeback against Duke in the East Regional final loomed over the entire struggle as Michigan failed to put the Huskies away.

“We did not come here for watches, we came here for rings,” Hurley said. “We lost the game because we didn’t make enough shots.

“But it’s hard to be upset with your team when they get 22 offensive rebounds versus that team. That’s just how hard we just played to hold that team to 38% from the field.”

Michigan powered through this slog with star Lendeborg clearly limited by a knee injury suffered against Arizona. He was tentative and ineffective through the first half, telling TBS at halftime that he felt “awful.” But Lendeborg cobbled together enough plays to finish with 13 points, making all five of his free throws. (If you want to know where Michigan won the game, look at its 25-of-28 foul shooting.) 

“We had to dig deep,” Lendeborg said.

Afterward, as Lendeborg stood on the court waiting to cut down his piece of championship net, his mother, Yissel Raposo, leaned her head affectionately on his back. She’s been treated for a tumor on her appendix; watching Yaxel blossom after his life was in danger of veering off track as a teenager has been the best therapy.

“It’s been a long way,” Raposo said of her son’s journey. “But today was the most happiest day for me.”

It was the happiest day for all Michigan fans, who have now celebrated national championships in football and men’s basketball in the last three seasons. They won the Dusty Derby to land the best basketball coach on the market in 2024, and there is every reason to believe that their winning will continue as long as May is the coach of the Wolverines.

But the cycle of building teams in the portal era never stops. As the Wolverines celebrated on the court and the clock neared midnight, assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen looked at his watch and said, “16 minutes until the portal opens.”

Rest assured, Dusty May and Michigan will be ready.

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